Standards¶

AGI builds on established neuroscience data standards to ensure interoperability and long-term value of annotations.

Core Standards¶

HED (Hierarchical Event Descriptors)

A standardized vocabulary for describing events in behavioral experiments.

HED Guidelines
BIDS (Brain Imaging Data Structure)

A standard for organizing neuroimaging data and metadata.

BIDS Integration
Stim-BIDS (BEP044)

Extension for organizing stimulus files and their annotations.

Annotation Format

Why Standards Matter¶

The Annotation Gap¶

Naturalistic stimuli datasets are rich in information but poor in annotation. While a 2-hour movie contains millions of visual frames, emotional beats, dialogue, and scene changes, typical datasets arrive with only basic timing information.

This creates a fundamental problem:

Analysis Type	Annotation Requirement
Hyperalignment	Low (timing only)
Functional connectivity	Low (timing only)
GLM-based analytics	High (event descriptions)
Encoding models	High (feature annotations)
Representational similarity	High (stimulus features)

The result: researchers default to simpler paradigms despite rich data, because the annotation burden is prohibitive.

AGI's Solution¶

AGI provides:

Standardized format via HED and Stim-BIDS
Version control via GitHub
Collaborative curation via PRs and issues
Automated validation via HEDit
Community building via shared repositories

Standard Integration¶

graph TD
    A[Raw Stimuli] --> B[Image Annotation Tool]
    B --> C[Natural Language Descriptions]
    C --> D[HEDit]
    D --> E[Valid HED Annotations]
    E --> F[events.tsv + events.json]
    F --> G[BIDS Dataset]

Key Resources¶

Standard	Documentation	Schema
HED	hedtags.org	hed-schemas
BIDS	bids.neuroimaging.io	bids-specification
Stim-BIDS	BEP044	In development

Validation Tools¶

HEDit: AI-powered HED annotation generation and validation
hed-validator: Official HED validation library
bids-validator: BIDS dataset validation